Many people on the left are going to tell you the State Department’s Inspector General report that found Hillary Clinton subverted Federal records laws is no big deal and couldn’t possibly cost her the election. I am not one of those people.
First of all — it is a big deal. While the report said that Hillary shouldn’t be singled-out among past Secretaries of State, she still broke major laws, and those laws pertain to official government documents. I’m a big transparency guy, but something tells me we really don’t want our public officials, any public officials, not using official government channels for their communications. Isn’t that just kind of um, I don’t know, logical?
It protects our leaders and us, and helps make things like Freedom of Information Act requests worth submitting, instead of at any given time our officials just claiming they can’t find the emails in their Gmail inboxes.
Whether or not she was hiding anything truly criminal isn’t really the point. The point is that we are supposed to be able to trust our government’s high-ranking officials aren’t effectively hiding their official communications from us, full-stop. I’m not arguing we have a right to see classified information, I’m saying that the reason we want everything stored on the government’s servers is pretty easily understood — accountability.
When you’re already a politician that has a reputation for thinking you’re above the law, this report does not bode well for dispelling that image. In fact, it stokes that fire rather easily, because it proves that while this is systemic and was done in multiple administrations, she still willfully chose to break the law. Die-hard Hillary folks will dismiss this report, too, but this isn’t some wild-eyed Benghazi conspiracy theory. This is an honest-to-God Inspector General’s report that very clearly takes her to task for her flouting of the rules.
So the question becomes do people outside of the die-hards roll over on this?
Some most definitely will. There will certainly be people casting their primary ballots in California for Hillary not knowing about the IG’s report. There will similarly be people in November who are ignorant of this story. But the burning question there is how many are ignorant, and how many are well-informed. You can count on the overwhelming majority of Republicans knowing about it, but what about independents? You know, the people who Clinton and the DNC have tried very hard to keep from showing a welcoming spirit too?

Being a clown-faced shitstick, I’m not a political pundit, nor an expert. However, my job as a satirist is to observe and to do so from as a high perch as possible to see all angles of something. Right now, I see a country that is bitter and angry at the establishment, whether Republican or Democrat, and finding out that a very powerful member of that group of people pretty much gave the finger to laws meant to stifle even the appearance of corruption is only going to fan the fires of hostility against Hillary. This whole primary her supporters have been downplaying how deeply unpopular she is outside the Democratic bubble, but this story may be the best test of that hypothesis yet.
If in fact most Americans won’t care that she has been caught pretty much red-handed breaking federal laws regarding the handling of information, then this story will fade away. If people do care and are fed-up in general with this kind of behavior from politicians, it might cause problems at the ballot box. There doesn’t have to be an indictment for people to surmise, for example, that she’s someone who doesn’t care about the rules, or any consequences of her actions therefore. That’s a dangerous trait to have in a potential presidential candidate.
I’m not here to tell you Hillary should be indicted for this, though. I’m not a tinfoil hat wearing Sanders supporter; just an intellectually honest one. That being said, it has been well-documented by that super-conservative rag Mother Jonesthat Hillary used her connections as SecState to broker international contracts for arms dealers that were also contributors to the Clinton Foundation. You combine that fact with this story, and you have yourself a person who is rife for conspiracy theories.

None of them have to actually be true for conservatives to believe them, and while that may not concern you too much, just think of the last eight years, but add into the mix that Obama was dinged by the government for breaking federal laws. That’s what Hillary’s first term will look like, multiplied by a thousand, and Washington will grind to an even slower pace as they investigate everything about her, justifying it by saying, “Welp, she’s already violated federal law once…”
And I know for damn certain if this were a story about the presumptive Republican frontrunner, liberals would be screaming bloody murder like conservatives are doing over Hillary’s breach of the law, and make no mistake, that’s exactly what she did.